…and technology is not always the answer.

OK, so I’m not the first to blog about this, however I’m using cobbler and puppet to automate the creation of VMs on my laptop for testing/staging purposes so I thought I’d blog about it here.

The aim is to use Cobbler to setup the base operating system and install puppet, then let Puppet take over and install and configure the rest of the system.

There’s a few things we need to do:

Install a server to act as the “master” server

Install Cobbler

Install Puppet

Although I usually use Debian or Ubuntu, Cobbler works best on CentOS and that’s what I use during my day job, so we’ll be installing CentOS as the base operating system on the master server.

Download the version of CentOS you want to use (although it’s worth digging out the “netinstall” image if you don’t want to download five or six isos!) and install an absolute minimal system – disable everything when it asks you which packages to install – the less clutter the better!